Sugar daddies

Last Tuesday saw our first meeting of the "Daddies and Pappas 2B" course. A weekly gathering of queer gentlemen couples occupies a second floor room at the downtown Y and dicusses the ups and downs, pits and falls of parenting. Queer lady couples meet simultaneously downstairs at the "Dykes & Tykes" class, and though T & I were disappointed not to be integrated with these Sapphic moms, we are both looking forward to the cross-class potluck in a few weeks. Our facilitator is a terribly sweet gentleman, not a parent himself but the product of queer parenting, although he has a facilitating voice that I find sometimes overly conscientious. We are joined in class by a pair of air stewards, two elderly couples, one of which has already parented the biological daughter of one of the members, an enormous refrigerator-like and suspiciously straight-behaving bloke whose partner was "busy", and us. Our first class entailed the screening of a video about queer parents in the San Francisco area. I fully expected to see P, that odd but delightful gentleman Yatsu and I know who adopted two feisty infants some years ago...and so I did, but only in a wordless wave-by. One of his sons was dangling off his arm and P was smiling indulgently down at him. There was another chap I recognized in the video, though I couldn't quite place him. Anyway, it was good to see queer men doing what we think we want to do, but it didn't even begin to answer any of the manifold logistical questions T & I have.

It also brought up a difficult issue for me, and one I sense will come up again in this class: socio-economics. I am my parents' child in this: money matters to me. I don't want to have a child if money is an issue. I want the house, I want the volvo, I want to be able to spend time with a child without being beholden to an employer. This is complicated territory for me: I'd like to think I want all these things for my child, but how much is this me wanting these things for myself? How much is this the drag of parenthood? I mean the outfit, the getup, the external trappings? I grew up very much aware of money; we were not poor, but we were far from wealthy, and yet my parents managed somehow - and by it seems to me a conscious effort - to project an image of wealth. We had the big house, the pool, the two cars, we went abroad once a year. We lived in a relatively upscale neighbourhood, and I went to a private school, so my friends were all boys from privileged homes, and by all appearances, I was one of them. The cost of this effort of impersonation was that my parents could often not afford their chosen lifestyle. They spoke constantly between themselves, and in our earshot, of their lack of resources. One of the most peristent messages I received in my childhood was that any day, any moment, the money could stop, completely dry out, and our life, our image would shatter. I lived in mortal fear of any of my friends discovering the truth. Today my relationship with money is seriously fucked up. It is usually my first and last consideration; I feel like money and I are negatively-charged magnets; when I have it, I pretend it's not there. It sits at the heart of so much of my regret. This is not a thing I want to give to a child. I want my child to have a healthy relationship with money, and whether this means having oodles of it or just being in a position to impart understanding and perspective on it. I mean, given all the above, I consider myself a fairly detached person materialistically, but I can only imagine what sort of monster I would be if I received that messaging in 2006 and in a north American context.

The upshot of all of this is the oldest excuse in the parenting book: I want to be ready. And the irrefutable argument is that while we have the freedom to plan our readiness, biology doesn't always wait, and many children have come into unprepared lives, and fared beautifully. We will be ready when we have to be; I have perfect faith in our combined abilities, if not in my individual pathologies. So, when this class is done, in ten weeks, will we be ready to have a child? No, but we are hoping we'll be closer to a decision.